William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Trained for years to obey and serve, he hurried back to his regiment. In the next hours, German tanks blew up most of his .76-millimeter guns; Stuka dive-bombers burned the steppe grass around him with incendiary bombs. In desperation, Tomskuschin dispatched a messenger to the rear, to the bridge crossing the Don at Kalach, where he hoped there was some sort of headquarters. While he waited for orders, the blinding disk of the sun beat down, the Stukas hovered and dove. Casualties soared; by late afternoon more than four hundred men lay dead or wounded in the grass. The messenger never returned.

At twilight, Tomskuschin gathered his aides. “Assemble the men after dark,” he told them. “Head for the Don. Take everyone and everything that can move.”

He had made his compromise between conflicting orders.

In the sudden cool of nightfall, the men formed up and shuffled off to the east. Conversation was forbidden. Even so, weapons clanked against mess tins, and the troops cursed loudly when they stumbled. As the moon peeped fitfully through the clouds, Tomskuschin listened for suspicious sounds. Occasionally a rifle popped, but it was always far away, and the major whispered his troops on. Suddenly the darkness burst into a thousand lights, and tracer bullets ripped into the column from both sides of the road.

“Ambush!” Tomskuschin screamed. “Run, run to the river!”

The regiment stampeded into the darkness, but Tomskuschin stayed behind. It was quiet now, except for moans from the road, and he crawled into the high grass to await the dawn.

Lying under a brilliant canopy of stars, he thought of his family, safe in Sverdlovsk behind the Ural Mountains. He had not seen them for more than a year, since the war began and swept him to this wretched field. He thought, too, about his military career, irrevocably ruined since he had chosen to move back against Stalin’s orders. While he had no regrets about disobeying a senseless order that conflicted with his duty to his men, he had no illusions about the fate awaiting him back at headquarters. His offense was punishable by death.

As dawn streaked the sky, the major rummaged in a pocket for his wallet and took out wrinkled pictures of his wife and son, six-year-old Vladimir. He held the photos a long time before he put them down and reached for his pistol. As he raised the gun and fingered the trigger, the image of Vladimir seemed to rise up before him. He hesitated, wanting desperately to hold the boy in his arms. Even imprisonment in Germany might be better than destroying his last chance to see the child. He eased the pistol back in the holster.

The Germans found him in the high grass. “ Ruki verkh!” they shouted; he raised his hands meekly in surrender. They took his wallet and ring, but they did not abuse him and he rode away from the battlefield on top of a German tank. Tomskuschin was not afraid. In fact, he felt invigorated. He had a dream to realize someday, back behind the Urals where little Vladimir watched for his return.

In the aftermath of the battle around Ostrov, the German Sixth Army counted its booty: “more than fifty-seven thousand prisoners, more than one thousand tanks destroyed.”

As a result, General Paulus saluted his men with a special message: “The Russian Sixty-second Army and great parts of the First Tank Army are destroyed….Thanks to a brave advance… the possibility of this victory was set… We proudly think of the fallen… on to the next task set by the Führer….”

Despite the fantastic success of Paulus’s forces in crushing the last Russian resistance west of the Don, the most immediate danger to Stalingrad was the Fourth Panzer Army, which was swinging northeast to join the assault on the city. Any advance they made would be along a major highway and rail line, and they had no rivers to cross.

It was logical then, that the commander of the Fourth Panzer Army, horse-faced “Papa” Hoth, should relish his new assignment. His scouts had already worked their way to within twenty miles of Stalingrad’s outskirts and with luck, Hoth hoped to beat Paulus into the city. Even the latest intelligence reports of stiffening Soviet resistance at the low range of hills crossing the railroad and highway near Abganerovo just south of the city did not worry him. He was confident he could not be stopped.

Most of the Russian stragglers retreating toward Stalingrad would have agreed with this estimate of the situation. Disillusioned, desperate, they had been reduced to fighting each other for scraps of food and water—especially water, which was scarce on the barren steppe. At precious watering holes they found another enemy had been there before them: the Kalmucks, natives to the region and intensely anti-Communist, had thrown dead animals into the wells. The poisoned water quickly killed unwary drinkers.

One retreating Russian soldier, curly-haired Lt. Hersch Gurewicz, forgot his thirst as he dove into a ditch for the third time that day. The Stukas were back, like prehistoric birds, circling impudently, searching for carrion below. Gurewicz was exhausted. Chased by the Germans for more than a year, he had begun to wonder where it would all end. Just twenty-one years old, a native of Mogilev near the Polish border, he had first joined the Red Army in 1940 during the war with the Finns. Then, his mother had been a Communist party member, working for the military. His father taught violin at the Rimsky-Korsakov School of Music in Mogilev. The German invasion had brought death to both his mother and sister, who were tracked down and slain as partisans; his father and brother disappeared into the army and Hersch had been unable to locate them since.

Now in the ditch fifty miles southwest of Stalingrad, Gurewicz was a hardened veteran. He could tell by the sound of a shell whether it was close or meant for someone behind him; he knew the exact moment to run for cover when bombers began to hurtle down out of the sun. He knew other things, too, like the price of desertion. He had seen the “Green Hats” of the NKVD instilling their special brand of discipline. The NKVD first appeared on the battlefield in July when Joseph Stalin made the Red Army a scapegoat to appease public indignation and fear about the German advance across the steppe. Stalin’s Order Number 227 had unleashed a reign of terror. At countless roadblocks, the Green Hats inspected papers, asked curt questions, and shot anyone suspected of running from the front. Thousands of corpses lined the roads as a warning to those contemplating such desertion.

Gurewicz had seen mounds of bodies at the checkpoints, but they did not shock him for he had seen worse. The previous winter, fighting as a partisan, he had entered the town of Rudnia just after the Germans left. The body of a woman lay in the street. She was blonde, young, and must have been pretty, but her arms, extended upward, had no hands, and her legs had been cut off above the knees. Someone had slit her torso from navel to crotch with a knife or bayonet. Around the corpse stood a crowd of people crying loudly. One man spoke up in trembling indignation.

“This was our schoolteacher,” he said, weeping. “She taught our children.”

His stomach churning, Gurewicz had turned away.

Once when the Germans caught him, he had learned of their savagery firsthand. Trapped in an ambush, he was marched for miles with a rope around his neck as an object lesson to villagers. A sign pinned to his chest read: “I am a Russian Partisan.” Later, at Gestapo headquarters, he passed into the hands of specialists, two blond officers in black uniforms, who pulled him into a room where another partisan had been strapped onto a table. While Gurewicz watched, a German turned a lever and the table moved apart in sections like a rack. A terrible scream burst from the man’s throat and his leg bones snapped through his skin. The lever turned again and his arms ripped apart in jagged tears. When the man fainted, his torturers shot him dead.